Is Sitecore Azure right for you?

In a recent discovery project I was evaluating Sitecore Azure. I have worked with Amazon AWS and EC2 before and so I was really excited to learn about Azure.

Site in the cloud, limitless possibilities, scalability…. Wrong.

I was extremely disappointed that Sitecore Azure cannot handle the solution we were proposing due to limitation on the Azure platform. In my mind a cloud based solution shouldn’t have the limits I was encountering with Azure.

We scoped out and built applications similar to this before, applications that are multi-lingual with multiple country sites. Typically this kind of Sitecore application with out of the box analytics is consuming around 52GB of data.

This is with only a handful of country websites. The master and web databases are not that far behind, they are running between 30 – 40GB.

The requirements were simple:

Sitecore Application will host and run over 100 website.

Each website will have an average of 2 languages.

Most of the sites will use out of the box DMS features.

Some sites will host content while others will host products.

There was a need to store a huge amount of documents in the media library.

Store videos in Azure Media Services.

Based on the previous experience, we are looking at an analytics db which can run at 520GB for an application with about 150 websites. Imagine the sizes for the master and web databases.

Consider the facts of Sitecore Azure (it’s not really Sitecore’s fault, I put this mostly on Azure):

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This is a personal blog. Any views or opinions represented in this blog are my own and do not represent those of people, institutions or organizations that the I may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity including past, current and future employers, unless explicitly stated.